September 29, 2020
Joseph F. Arboleda-Velasquez, MD, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and assistant scientist at Mass Eye and Ear who studies small vessel disease in the brain and the eye, has been awarded a five-year, $4 million gift from Good Ventures to spur his lab’s groundbreaking work into Alzheimer’s disease genetic resistance.
This transformational gift will enable Dr. Arboleda-Velásquez to build upon the recent discovery of a genetic mutation that protected in a woman who had a high familial risk for the condition and amyloid plaque deposits in her brain against early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
The gift funds will support two research projects that aim to:
- Examine the function of a protective genetic variant described in a woman with high familial risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but who has not yet developed the condition
- Discover new genes and biological markers potentially associated with resistance to Alzheimer’s in the world’s largest population of familial Alzheimer’s in Colombia